A History of India (Blackwell History of the World) by Burton Stein, David Arnold

February 17, 2017 @ 4:16 pm

By Burton Stein, David Arnold

I'm a certified historical past instructor who got this ebook whereas searching for a superb, scholarly, massive, one-volume historical past of India. It used to be a waste of $40. the writer used to be an American Marxist historian who, whereas he taught in a British collage, continues all through a virulently anti-British drumbeat. He even manages to tug digs on the British into discussions of India within the seventh. century. It turns into very tedious. He additionally focuses seriously at the heritage of southern India, his most well liked quarter of research, whereas minimizing insurance of a few vital components of northern history.

In many situations, he's so fixated on arguing particular points-of-view, he fails to provide an entire photograph of the civilization he's supposedly describing. He talks concerning the conquest of the Gupta empire, for instance, and discusses social adjustments in the course of that interval; yet does not pause to inform the reader whatever approximately Gupta tradition and achievements. Later, he repeats the accusations opposed to Warren Hastings, supplies completely NO description of Hastings' activities as Governor-General, yet makes transparent his assumption that Hastings was once accountable via a sour little connection with his suicide.

In brief, avoid this booklet. I want I had my $40 again to shop for anything else. i'm nonetheless searching for that scholarly and reliable background of India. this isn't it.

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Additional info for A History of India (Blackwell History of the World)

Example text

2 Communities as states (‘great communities’) from bce 800 to 300 ce, when the Gupta monarchy was founded. 3 Communities and states, 300 ce to 1700. 21 Introduction 4 States without communities, from 1700 to the present, when the historic conception of ‘community’ had been reduced from what had been historically vital and changing community formations to decorticated shells of ideology. COMMUNITIES WITHOUT STATES The idea of complex communities persisting over an extended period of time and space forced itself upon me some years ago when, in Paris, I visited the superb exhibition devoted to the microlithic site of Mehrgarh, near the Bolan Pass.

In Karnataka, Jainism enjoyed a very long prominence as a major religion and attracted considerable royal patronage as a legacy of early Magadhan and Mauryan trade via the famous Dakshinapatha route from the Gangetic plain. This commercial connection continued during and after medieval times, and Gangetic products continued to find their way into the south. Jainas found niches in Karnatak culture that were denied to them among Tamils after the sixth century ce. The adoption, indeed, the invention, of devotional practice and theology in the worship of Shiva and Vishnu among Tamils was conterminous with the establishment of the new kingdom of the Pallavas and the resurgence of one of the old muventar, the Pandyans.

It was from these shores and those across the peninsula in Malabar that Islam, too, was carried to the Malay peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago in later times. All of this points to relations as dense, significant and enduring as those between regions within the subcontinent as conventionally viewed, and the historical imagination must be taught to adjust the mind’s map to register these interactions. Historically and prehistorically, west Asian peoples have drifted or thundered into the Indian subcontinent from what is now Iran and Central Asia, whose rulers have even occasionally, as in the case of the Persian Achaemenids (sixth to fourth centuries bce), tried to assimilate parts of the subcontinent.